Author Archives: Ida Torres

Jennie’s adidas Superstar Actually Looks Like a Ballet Flat

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One of the biggest trends in sneakers and footwear in general over the past few years has been big brands rolling out their own take on “balletcore.” Personally, it’s a trend I hope sticks around, since the designs we’ve seen so far give me serious sneaker envy. They tend to strike the perfect blend between fashion and comfort, and for anyone who’s on their feet all day but still wants to look stylish, this aesthetic is one of the better options out there.

If you’re a fan of adidas and K-pop, specifically Blackpink, this latest collaboration with Jennie (who’s also a successful soloist in her own right) will be right up your soles. The adidas Superstar SQ Ballet marks the first pair of shoes Jennie has ever co-designed for any brand, which makes it a genuine collector’s item. But even if you’re not a K-pop fan, this is still worth a look if you’re after ballet-inspired shoes built for comfortable, everyday wear rather than actual dancing.

Designer: Jennie x adidas Originals

The Superstar has long been one of adidas’ most recognizable sneakers, but this version trades in the brand’s signature rounded shell toe for a square, ballet-flat-like toe box. Standard laces are gone too, replaced by an elastic closure that lets you slip into the shoes effortlessly. To complete the ballet look, a leather ribbon with a delicate bow accent runs across the vamp, giving the sneaker a softer, more feminine touch.

Don’t let the delicate detailing fool you, though. The upper is crafted from premium leather, built for durability and everyday comfort as much as style. An ultra-light EVA foam sole keeps it wearable from morning to night, and both colorways, off-white/black and black/off-white, lean into the “quiet luxury meets streetwear” mood dominating fashion now.

The Superstar SQ Ballet drops in two colorways, listed under style codes LB3786 (Off White/Core Black/Core White) and LB3787 (Core Black/Core Black/Off White), priced at $130 on adidas.com. It anchors a bigger capsule called adidas Originals by JENNIE, built around a concept she’s dubbed “Functional Grace,” which also includes reworked trackwear, wrap skirts, sheer layers, and knitwear.

On her vision for the line, Jennie said she wanted to bring together the elegance of ballet and the freedom of space as concepts for “softness and strength.” She added that reworking the Superstar was about bringing “the softness and restraint found in ballet, as well as the strength behind it,” to a shoe that still feels unmistakably adidas. Reportedly, the design took a full year to complete, which explains why every detail feels intentional rather than rushed.

This isn’t the first time balletcore has found its way onto a sneaker, and we’ve covered plenty of these hybrid designs before. Converse Japan gave the All Star its own ballet-flat makeover with delicate straps and a softer silhouette, while Nike added satin ribbons to its Air Rift “Black Swan” that you could wrap around your ankle for a more theatrical finish. Birkenstock even teamed up with Repetto, the French ballet shoe maker, blurring the line between sandal and slipper entirely. What sets Jennie’s Superstar SQ Ballet apart is that it isn’t just a licensed nod to ballet dreamed up by a design team. It comes from someone with a genuine point of view on softness and strength, backed by a full year of development instead of a quick seasonal push.

At the end of the day, balletcore sneakers like this one prove that comfort and elegance don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Whether you’re drawn to it because you’re a die-hard Blackpink fan, an adidas collector, or simply someone who appreciates a sneaker that can go from errands to dinner without missing a beat, the Superstar SQ Ballet earns its spot in the rotation. And if this trend keeps producing shoes this thoughtful, I, for one, hope brands never let balletcore leave the building.

The post Jennie’s adidas Superstar Actually Looks Like a Ballet Flat first appeared on Yanko Design.

Mood Lighting Without the App, the Bulb, or the Smart Home

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One of the things I distinctly remember from my cinematography class back in university is how changing the color gels on a light stand completely transforms how a scene is lit. I never ended up pursuing a career in the industry, but it’s a lesson that stuck with me. To this day, I pay close attention to lighting whenever I watch a theater performance, sit in on a photo shoot, or attend an event. Lighting is everything in those industries, and now, that same idea is making its way into home decor.

Enter the Gel Lamp, designed by London-based designer Billy Easter through his studio, Public Parts. It’s a cube-shaped table lamp made from hand-cast silicone that borrows this exact concept from professional lighting design. But instead of swapping out an entire bulb, you change a slim, translucent silicone slide, called a “gel,” that slots into a narrow opening near the base of the lamp, right where the dimmable LED sits.

Designer: Billy Easter

The lamp itself measures roughly 11.5 by 11.5 by 11.5 centimeters, a compact hollow cube that hides more craftsmanship than its simple geometric shape suggests. Slide in a different colored gel, and the light filtering through the cube shifts instantly. No new lamp required, no bulb to hunt down and replace.

The idea behind the Gel Lamp is refreshingly simple: you don’t need five different lamps to switch up the mood lighting in your space. Swapping one gel for another does the job, not unlike flipping to a different vinyl record or changing your outfit when you need a different vibe for the night. It turns something as mundane as adjusting a lamp into a small creative ritual, a low-effort, high-impact way to personalize your space on any given day.

If you’re the type who appreciates when materials feel “coherent,” this lamp will scratch that itch. The entire object, from the outer shell to the interchangeable gels themselves, is made from silicone. That single-material approach gives the lamp a soft, tactile feel in your hands, while still holding its structural shape on a shelf or nightstand. It’s the kind of object that looks minimal and geometric from across the room, but surprises you the moment you actually touch it.

Compare it to something like a Philips Hue smart bulb, which is arguably the biggest name in mood lighting right now. Hue bulbs let you change color through an app, complete with presets, schedules, and voice control through Alexa or Google Assistant. It’s convenient, sure, but it’s also entirely digital: you’re tapping a screen, not touching anything real. The Gel Lamp takes the opposite approach. There’s no app, no Bluetooth pairing, no software update required. You physically pick up a gel, slide it in, and watch the light change right in front of you. For anyone who’s grown a little tired of “smart” everything, that tactile, hands-on simplicity is the whole appeal. It also sidesteps the disposable feel of cheap color-changing LED strips you’d find at a big-box store; this is a small-batch, hand-cast object meant to be kept, not tossed after the novelty wears off.

That said, the Gel Lamp isn’t trying to compete on features. It won’t sync to your smart home or dim itself on a schedule. What it offers instead is something a little more personal: a genuine physical interaction with light and color, the same interaction I first fell in love with in that cinematography classroom years ago. It’s a reminder that changing the atmosphere of a room doesn’t need to be automated to feel meaningful. Sometimes it just needs a good gel and a steady hand.

Whether you’re drawn to it for the craftsmanship, the tactile silicone, or simply the nostalgia of manually adjusting light like a set designer would, the Gel Lamp proves that mood lighting doesn’t have to come from an app. Sometimes, the most satisfying upgrade to your space is the one you can hold in your hand.

The post Mood Lighting Without the App, the Bulb, or the Smart Home first appeared on Yanko Design.

Yiayia Transformable Bag by Sophia Lampropoulou

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I’ve always been a big-bag person. When I head out for the day, I want something that can hold my wallet, a paperback, snacks, and at least two things I didn’t plan on bringing along. But every once in a while, I want to switch things up and carry something small for fashion’s sake instead. The catch is that most tiny bags look adorable and hold absolutely nothing. The Yiayia Transformable Bag by Sophia Lampropoulou seems to check every box on my list, and it comes with a heartwarming story about family and cultural preservation as a bonus.

The bag is built around an authentic Cretan embroidery pattern that the Greek designer’s grandmother originally stitched by hand. This textile art, passed down through generations, became the conceptual and visual foundation of the entire piece. Yiayia isn’t just “inspired by” Greek culture in some vague, marketing-friendly way. It’s a genuine family heirloom translated into something you can wear, carry, and maybe even use as a conversation starter with strangers who ask where you got it.

Designer: Sophia Lampropoulou (3D Season)

Here’s where things get interesting from a design standpoint. Lampropoulou didn’t just print her grandmother’s embroidery onto a flat surface and call it a day. She digitized the pattern and rebuilt it as a flexible, modular 3D printed surface using TPU, a stretchy, durable material that behaves a lot like textile while holding its shape better than fabric alone.

The genius move is that the pattern isn’t decorative, it’s structural. The geometry of the embroidery actually determines how the bag flexes, how weight gets distributed, and how it holds together. In other words, her grandmother’s stitching is the bag’s skeleton, not just its skin. Using a set of metal rings, that TPU surface folds and reconfigures into four different carrying styles, so the same bag can go from a compact crossbody to a slouchier shoulder bag depending on your mood or outfit. The whole process blended cultural research with parametric design software and additive manufacturing, which is a fancy way of saying Lampropoulou used cutting edge tools to keep a centuries old craft alive instead of letting it fade into a museum display.

The design world has taken notice, too. Yiayia won a Silver Award at the London Design Awards 2025 in the Fashion Design, Bags category, and it later picked up a Bronze A’ Design Award in the Fashion and Travel Accessories category.

If you’re picturing a shape-shifting bag and thinking of Bao Bao Issey Miyake, you’re not far off. That Japanese brand built an entire cult following around bags made of triangular panels that transform from flat pieces into geometric 3D shapes as you fill them, with prices typically landing between $400 and $480. Bao Bao’s magic is in its “shapes made by chance” concept, where the structure reacts to however you toss things inside it.

Yiayia takes a similar love of geometry and structural transformation but flips the intention. Instead of triangles chosen purely for eye-catching architecture, Yiayia’s pattern is a literal, traceable piece of one family’s history, and its four configurations are deliberate design choices rather than random shifts. Where Bao Bao is about engineered unpredictability, Yiayia is about engineered memory. For someone like me who wants a small bag with an actual story behind it, not just a cool silhouette, that distinction matters.

For big-bag loyalists like me, the real issue with tiny bags has never been the size, it’s the lack of personality and practicality packed into that size. Yiayia solves both problems at once. Its four-way transformation means one bag adapts to different outfits and occasions instead of sitting in a closet as a one-trick accessory. And because the design carries genuine cultural weight, it feels less like a passing trend and more like something worth holding onto.

At the end of the day, Yiayia proves that a small bag doesn’t have to be a compromise. It can be clever, sentimental, and still pull double duty when you need it to. If this is any indication of what Sophia Lampropoulou and her studio, 3D Season, have in store next, I’ll be keeping a close eye on her work, and probably saving up for one of her bags along the way.

The post Yiayia Transformable Bag by Sophia Lampropoulou first appeared on Yanko Design.

The KitchenAid Luminaire Mixer That Glows On Your Countertop

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I’ve recently started becoming more serious about cooking. I’m still in the beginner phase, so all I really need right now is a good set of pots and pans and a working stove. But I already have a running wish list of kitchen accessories I’d like to get someday, and a good stand mixer sits right at the top of it. KitchenAid® is a brand that’s always top of mind (if not top of my wallet), and the newest version of their mixer might just be the one that finally talks me into opening it.

The KitchenAid® Design Series Luminaire is the brand’s newest limited-run stand mixer, and it’s built entirely in-house by KitchenAid’s own design team rather than an outside collaborator. Instead of the classic stainless steel bowl that comes with most mixers, this one has a ridged glass bowl. That lets you actually watch what you’re mixing while also making the whole process look like a “radiant masterpiece” as you prep whatever you’re cooking or baking.

Designer: KitchenAid®

Built into the base of the mixer is an LED light that shines up through the fluted glass, scattering light patterns you can clearly see while the mixer runs. It might sound purely decorative, but the fluting is engineered to catch, bend, and diffuse that light so you get a glowing, jewel-like effect rather than a flat glare. It looks great on a kitchen counter, and probably even better in photos and videos, which is a nice bonus if you’re into cooking or food content creation.

The mixer’s signature color, Blue Peppercorn, is a calming, muted blue finished with a soft, crinkled texture. KitchenAid says the shade was inspired by “the final crack of seasoning, the moment everything comes together,” which is a fitting little origin story for a mixer built around light. A polished chrome hub cover and a color-matched trim band with polished accents contrast nicely against that textured body, giving it a “jewelry on the counter” look instead of just another appliance taking up space.

Underneath all that glow, the Luminaire is built on KitchenAid’s trusted Artisan® Plus platform, so it’s not just a pretty face. It runs on 11 speeds with Precision Speed Control, letting you fine-tune your mix from a gentle fold to a fast whip, and it comes with dishwasher-safe stainless steel attachments (flat beater, wire whip, and dough hook), so cleanup doesn’t cancel out the decor appeal. It’s also compatible with KitchenAid’s full lineup of attachments, meaning the same base can grind meat, roll pasta, or spiralize vegetables if you ever want to go beyond baking.

The 5-quart tilt-head model runs $699.99, and it’s actually the third mixer in KitchenAid’s Design Series lineup, following the 2022 Blossom and the viral 2024 Evergreen. This time, the aesthetic even extends beyond the mixer, with a matching Blue Peppercorn cookware line dropping later this fall and a limited-edition 36-inch Blue Peppercorn commercial-style range for anyone renovating an entire kitchen around the color (that one runs a much less beginner-friendly $8,899).

If you’re comparing options, the obvious rival is Smeg’s 50’s Retro Style Stand Mixer, another design-forward pick that’s just as popular for making a kitchen look as good as it cooks. Smeg’s version retails around $599 (often discounted into the $400 to $550 range) and packs a 600-watt motor with 10 speeds and a classic stainless steel bowl, more raw horsepower, in other words, but none of the light-up glass theatrics. Reviewers have noted that Smeg wins on sheer power and vintage styling, but if you want a true all-purpose workhorse with a deeper attachment ecosystem, KitchenAid is usually the recommended alternative. Basically, it comes down to whether you want a mixer that performs like a heavy-duty tool or one that doubles as a glowing centerpiece.

For a beginner like me, is $699.99 justified before I’ve even mastered basic knife skills? Probably not yet. But it’s exactly the kind of splurge that earns a spot on a “someday” list, landing somewhere between a stand mixer and a small sculpture. And unlike a lot of trend-driven kitchen gadgets, this one still does the actual job a stand mixer is supposed to do, it just does it with a little extra glow. If you’d rather try your luck than spend the money outright, KitchenAid is also running a sweepstakes giving away five Luminaire mixers, which might be the more beginner-budget-friendly way in for now.

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A Tiny Osaka Café That Refuses to Line Up With Its Own Street

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Midosuji doesn’t leave much room for interpretation. Osaka’s most famous boulevard runs dead straight for miles, lined with gingko trees and glass towers that all seem to agree on the same rules of proportion and restraint. It’s a street built on order, and that order is exactly the problem a small coffee shop faces when it tries to plant itself there. How do you get noticed, or even remembered, on an avenue designed to make everything feel uniform and permanent?

TEKI Design answered that question by refusing the grid entirely. The new Osaka branch of 2050 Coffee, tucked into a compact 57.62 square meter footprint along the axis, leans into diagonal walls and angled openings that cut against Midosuji’s rigid north south line. It’s a small architectural rebellion, and it works because it never shouts. The geometry just sits there, off kilter in a city block built on right angles, and lets the contrast do the talking.

Designer: TEKI Design

There’s a second problem buried inside this project, one that has nothing to do with real estate and everything to do with coffee itself. The brand takes its name from a genuinely unsettling forecast: that by 2050, climate change could wipe out more than half the land currently suitable for growing coffee. TEKI Design has said the shop isn’t meant to solve that crisis outright, since no single café can, but to model the idea that a future problem this large gets chipped away by small, deliberate actions rather than one grand fix. The diagonal architecture is basically that philosophy rendered in steel and light. Nothing about it pretends to have the whole answer. It just commits to doing its one small thing well.

Inside, the café stacks its two floors vertically rather than spreading wide, which makes sense given how little ground it actually occupies. Angled forms pull visitors upward through the space, and the horizontal energy of the boulevard outside gets translated into a vertical sequence once you step through the door. Illuminated curves break up what could have felt like a cramped stairwell experience, and the circulation itself becomes part of the design rather than an afterthought bolted on at the end.

I like that this project treats scarcity as a design tool instead of a limitation to apologize for. A lot of retail architecture in tight urban lots tries to disguise how small the space actually is, adding mirrors and open sightlines to manufacture a sense of grandeur. TEKI Design does the opposite here. The diagonals make the compression feel intentional, almost theatrical, so that moving through the café becomes an experience defined by shifting angles rather than a race to the counter and back out the door.

None of this would matter much if the concept behind it felt hollow, and that’s the part worth sitting with. Climate messaging in commercial design tends to lean on materials, reclaimed wood, visible solar panels, the usual signals. This shop skips that vocabulary entirely and instead builds its point of view into the bones of the building. You don’t need a plaque explaining the mission. The architecture itself refuses to blend into a status quo that a warming climate is quietly rendering obsolete.

Specialty coffee culture in the U.S. has spent the last decade obsessing over sourcing transparency and bean provenance, so a shop built around admitting coffee’s uncertain future feels like a natural extension of that conversation rather than a foreign import. Whether or not the diagonal walls actually shift how people think about their next latte is impossible to measure. But the attempt itself, small, specific, and honest about its limits, feels more useful than another café dressed up in reclaimed timber and calling it sustainability. Sometimes the most effective statement a building can make is simply choosing not to line up with everything around it.

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Lululemon’s 80L Bag Refuses to Let You Pack Another Tote

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I often bring a large bag, or two, when I go out because I always seem to want to bring half of my house with me. There are my journals (yes, that’s plural), stationery supplies, a planner, a book or two, skincare and makeup essentials, my diabetic first aid kit, and various other knickknacks. So yes, I often bring a big-ass bag with me.

This new release from Lululemon matches my aesthetic perfectly. And yes, it’s actually called the Big-Ass Bag 80L, because how else would you describe it? It has a capacity of, you guessed it, 80 liters, and stands nearly three feet tall. So if you’d rather carry just one bag instead of juggling several, this is probably the biggest and most stylish option out there.

Designer: Lululemon

One challenge with big bags like this is that they can get quite heavy and dig into your collarbone. This particular Big-Ass Bag solves that problem with padded shoulder straps. Meanwhile, the integrated silicone grips keep it from sliding off your shoulder, which can be another common annoyance. And believe me, catching an 80-liter bag mid-slip will hurt your fingers and wrist.

You probably also don’t want everything you packed to shift and roll around inside, making it hard to dig through and find what you need when you need it. This bag comes with several built-in organizational features to prevent that. You get dual exterior zippered pockets, a dedicated water bottle holder, a zippered main compartment, and interior organizational pockets. There’s even a mini tote included for extra storage, in case everything somehow doesn’t fit into your already massive bag.

If you like clipping on photo card holders, plushies, gym tags, keys, or that included mini tote, the bag has a webbing loop attachment point for exactly that. It’s also designed to stand upright on its own, so there’s no danger of everything spilling out the moment you set it down. As for materials, it’s made from 100% recycled nylon and polyester, which fits neatly into the brand’s ongoing sustainability push. At $248, it isn’t cheap, but for a bag this size and this well thought out, it’s a reasonable ask.

So how does the Big-Ass Bag stack up against other giant carriers on the market? The most obvious comparison is Patagonia’s Black Hole Duffel 100L, a longtime favorite among travelers and gearheads. At around $225 and measuring 29 x 15 x 13.3 inches, the Black Hole holds even more volume, and its weatherproof, rugged shell is built to survive baggage handlers and years of rough use. But it’s a duffel, not a shoulder tote, so it’s better suited for trips and gear hauling than for daily errands.

Lululemon’s entry, by contrast, is designed with an upright, structured shape that works more like an oversized tote you can sling over one shoulder and walk into a grocery store or laundromat with. It won’t survive quite the abuse a Black Hole Duffel can take, but it doesn’t need to. This is a bag built for daily life, not base camp. If you want rugged travel gear, Patagonia still wins. If you want something that turns “I need to bring everything” into a single, stylish, over-the-shoulder grab-and-go, the Big-Ass Bag has the edge.

At the end of the day, this bag is proof that sometimes the simplest idea, just make it bigger, is exactly what people didn’t know they needed. It won’t fit in your closet quietly, and it definitely won’t let you forget you own it, but that’s sort of the point. Whether you’re the person who packs a “just in case” version of everything, a parent hauling three kids’ worth of gear, or someone who simply refuses to make two trips to the car, the Big-Ass Bag earns its name honestly. It’s oversized, it’s a little ridiculous, and it’s exactly as practical as it looks. For anyone tired of choosing between style and sheer carrying capacity, Lululemon just proved you don’t have to pick one.

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A Wireless Charger That Quietly Doubles as a Desk Lamp

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Most wireless chargers look like something you’d find in an airport lounge. Flat, black, forgettable. They do their one job and ask nothing of the rest of your desk, which is exactly the problem. Somewhere along the way, home offices turned into small personal galleries. People started adding framed photos, a fake fiddle-leaf fig, a candle nobody actually lights. And then, right in the middle of that carefully curated setup, sits a charging pad that looks like it fell off a delivery truck.

Yong Zhang and Lei Wang, two designers working out of Liaoning Petrochemical University in China, apparently noticed the same disconnect. Their answer is a device called Poetry-Electricity, a wireless charger that also functions as a small tabletop lamp, its surface dotted with tiny spherical lights arranged like buds on a branch. Set your phone down and it charges. Leave it there after dark and it glows, casting the kind of soft, scattered light that makes a desk feel less like a workstation and more like a place you’d actually want to sit.

Designers: Yong Zhang and Lei Wang

I like that the idea starts from a real observation rather than a trend chase. Office decor got personal because people needed their workspace to feel human again, not because a design blog said cozy desks were in. A charger that ignores that shift and just sits there being efficient and joyless is missing the point of why people started decorating in the first place.

What actually makes this more than a nice-looking gimmick is the engineering hiding underneath the poetry. The designers built in a magnetic barrier that blocks stray magnetic fields from interfering with the charging circuit, which is a fussy but important detail, since wireless charging pads are notorious for losing efficiency the moment anything metal or magnetic gets near the coil. There’s a rubber texture on the charging surface so your phone doesn’t slide off mid-charge, and a built-in lithium battery strip means the whole thing can be used away from an outlet, not just tethered to a desk. None of that is flashy. It’s the kind of quietly practical thinking that never shows up in a product photo but absolutely shows up in daily use, when your phone stays put and actually charges at the rate it’s supposed to.

I keep going back and forth on whether the tree-shaped light cluster is a little too on-the-nose as a metaphor for “growth” or “energy” or whatever the press materials probably say. But I’ll admit it works better in practice than it sounds on paper. A charging pad that also throws warm, broken-up light across a desk at 9 p.m. does something a single overhead bulb or a phone screen never will. It softens a room instead of just illuminating it. What strikes me most is how unbothered this design is by the usual tech industry instinct to hide function behind minimalism, or hide personality behind function. Most gadget design forces a choice: sleek and cold, or decorative and useless. Poetry-Electricity doesn’t pick a side. It just assumes your desk deserves both, and builds accordingly.

Whether it ever shows up on shelves at a price a normal person would pay is a separate question, and awards concepts like this one, a Silver winner from A’ Design Award, don’t always make that leap to retail. But the thinking behind it deserves more company. Desks aren’t going back to being purely functional spaces anytime soon, not with so much of the workday still happening from home. The objects that live there should probably stop pretending otherwise. A charger that also wants to be looked at isn’t solving a huge problem. It’s solving a small, honest one, the kind that’s easy to dismiss until you notice how much better a room feels once it’s gone.

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The Coat Rack With a Face Nobody Knew They Needed

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Every apartment has one corner that swallows things. Mine has swallowed umbrellas, gym bags, and for years, whatever coat happened to end up hanging on the back side of the rack, out of reach unless I dragged the whole thing away from the wall first. That is the quiet, unglamorous flaw baked into almost every coat rack ever made. It works fine until you need the jacket on the far side, and then you are either yanking furniture around or reaching behind it like you dropped your keys down the couch. You would think after all these decades of furniture design somebody would have solved that small annoyance by now, and yet most coat racks still ask you to work around them instead of the other way around.

Sophia Lampropoulou, the Athens based designer behind 3D Season, apparently got tired of the same problem and did something about it. Her piece, called Smile, is a floor standing coat rack that rotates a full 360 degrees, so instead of moving the rack to get to your coat, you just spin the head and the coat comes to you. It sounds almost too simple to be worth calling a design breakthrough, until you realize how long we have all quietly tolerated the alternative.

Designer: Sophia Lampropoulou (3D Season)

What actually makes Smile worth talking about is not just the rotation, though. The head is 3D printed and shaped like a smiling face, with an internal mechanism that lets it spin smoothly, while the arms that hold the clothes are made of natural wood. That combination matters more than it might seem on paper. Most furniture that leans on 3D printing ends up looking like a tech demo, all sharp edges and plastic sheen. Lampropoulou avoided that trap by pairing the printed core with actual wood, so the final object reads as warm and almost handmade, not like something that rolled straight out of a lab.

The face is the part that will either charm you or feel unnecessary, depending on your taste, and I will admit I landed on charmed. A coat rack has no obligation to have a personality. It is one of the most forgettable objects in a home, tucked into an entryway where nobody looks twice. Giving it an expression, even a simple printed smile, turns it into something you notice on your way out the door instead of something you walk past. That is a small trick, but it is the kind of small trick that separates furniture people actually enjoy owning from furniture that simply exists. It is a reminder that function and personality were never actually in competition to begin with.

There is also a practical case underneath the playful one. Smile ships flat pack and assembles without much fuss, which sounds like a footnote until you have moved a coat rack across a city and realized how awkward those things are to transport in one piece. Durability was clearly part of the brief too, since a rotating mechanism that wobbles or jams after a month would undo the entire point of the design.

The design world noticed. Smile picked up a win at the A’ Design Award in the 3D printed forms category and an honorable mention at the DNA Paris Design Awards, which is a respectable pair of nods for a piece this modest in scope. Coat racks rarely get awards attention, mostly because nobody expects them to solve anything. Lampropoulou treated an object most of us ignore as a real design problem, and that decision is exactly what earned the recognition.

At around 280 euros, Smile is not an impulse buy, and I would not pretend it is the answer to every cramped entryway out there. But it is a good example of what happens when a designer refuses to accept that a boring object has to stay boring. The best home goods rarely announce themselves loudly. They just quietly fix something you had stopped noticing was broken, and Smile does exactly that, one slow spin at a time.

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A Side Table That Actually Hides Books in Plain Sight

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Most side tables are liars. They show up looking clean, then gradually become the household surface nobody planned for: stacked magazines, a charging cable, three remote controls, and that one book you’ve been meaning to finish for six weeks. The table itself never had a real answer for any of it, just a flat top and occasionally a drawer that rattles. The clutter isn’t a behavior problem. It’s a design problem, and most furniture refuses to admit it.

Liam de la Bedoyere, the designer behind Bored Eye Design, built the Nudge Side Table around a different premise. The storage isn’t added to the table. It is the table. A thick cylindrical column of stacked plywood discs rises straight up, and near the top, two large circular platforms sit at slightly different heights, offset from each other just enough to open a horizontal slot between them. That slot fits a book. No drawer, no shelf bracket, no hinge. The gap does the work, and the gap only exists because one disc was deliberately nudged out of alignment with the other.

Designer Name: Liam de la Bedoyere (boredeye design)

The material choice earns its place here. Plywood is not a compromise; it’s a decision. Looking at the cylindrical body of the Nudge table, every individual layer is exposed on the curved surface, running around the column in thin parallel lines like growth rings on a cross-section of a tree. Up close, the texture reads almost geological, warm and stratified, with the natural variation in the pine grain showing through the smooth flat tops of both platforms. From above, the two circles overlap partially in a configuration that looks less like furniture and more like a Venn diagram drawn by someone who actually cared about geometry.

The proportions matter a lot here. The column is wide enough to feel substantial without being squat, and tall enough that the offset platforms land at a genuinely useful height next to a sofa or armchair. The upper disc sits slightly higher and further back; the lower disc projects forward, and the book rests in the slot between them, its spine flush with the edge. From the front, a bright red cover peeking out of the gap adds exactly the kind of color accent the natural pine needs. De la Bedoyere didn’t paint anything or add contrast artificially. He let the objects that live on the table do that instead, which is a confident move.

From certain angles, the silhouette is almost totemic. Two thick circles floating above a ribbed cylinder, slightly misaligned, the book suspended horizontally between them. It photographs like sculpture, but it functions without any instruction required. You look at it and immediately understand where the book goes. That kind of instant legibility is harder to achieve than it sounds, especially when the mechanism is structural rather than applied.

I keep thinking about what this table refuses to include. No joinery hardware buried inside the column. No shelf underneath with a lip to prevent things from sliding off. No rubber feet dressed up in brushed metal. The cylindrical form is self-contained, the platforms are the table, and the offset between them is the storage. Every potential addition was apparently considered and then left out, which is a discipline that most furniture design at any price point genuinely struggles with.

De la Bedoyere has been working through this problem across several pieces now. His Notch table earlier this year carved a vertical slot into a set of solid wooden legs for the same purpose. The Nudge table arrives at a similar conclusion through a completely different construction logic, stacking instead of subtracting, horizontal storage instead of vertical, two surfaces instead of one. Same stubbornness about keeping things elemental, different answer.

Side tables rarely attract this level of structural thinking. They get treated as the afterthought of the living room, bought last and replaced first. The Nudge table argues that the piece sitting closest to how you actually spend your time at home deserves more than a flat top and a prayer. Sometimes the most useful thing a designer can do is move one circle slightly to the left and let the gap speak for itself.

The post A Side Table That Actually Hides Books in Plain Sight first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Humidifier That Refuses To Use Synthetic Scent

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I have owned exactly four humidifiers in my adult life, and every single one of them looked like a medical device that wandered into my living room by mistake. White plastic, a blinking blue light, and a fine mist that smelled like nothing at all unless I dumped in a capful of essential oil that made the whole apartment smell like a spa that’s trying too hard. That’s the quiet frustration most of us live with. Humidifiers solve dry air, but they rarely solve the fact that they’re ugly, and the aromatherapy add-on usually means synthetic fragrance oils that can irritate sensitive noses or just smell fake after the third use.

Yong Zhang, an industrial design professor in China, designed something that sidesteps both problems at once. His creation, Potpourri, won an Iron A’ Design Award in the Home Appliances category, and it does something I have not seen another humidifier attempt. Instead of relying on bottled oils to generate scent, it grows actual flowers inside itself, and those flowers are the fragrance source. The device waters the plants, the plants release moisture and natural aroma into the air, and a transparent acrylic dome keeps everything protected while still letting sunlight through.

Designer: Yong Zhang

The problem this solves is more personal than it first sounds. Most aromatherapy devices are asking you to trust a manufacturer’s version of what lavender or eucalyptus should smell like. Potpourri asks you to trust an actual lavender plant. There is a meaningful difference between diffusing a synthetic approximation of a scent and standing near the real thing while it blooms. I find that distinction quietly compelling, because it reframes the humidifier from a utility object into something closer to a small ecosystem sitting on your desk.

The engineering challenge here was not trivial either. Getting flowers to actually thrive inside a humidifier, rather than rot from overwatering or wilt from underexposure to light, required Zhang to rethink how the enclosure handles both moisture and airflow. The acrylic cover does double duty: it shields the petals from being knocked around or damaged, and it creates a semi-enclosed microclimate that recycles water more efficiently, which means less refilling for the plant owner. It is a humidifier that also functions as a self-sustaining flowerpot, and I think that dual identity is the smartest part of the whole concept.

What strikes me as an American consumer looking at this design is how well it fits a moment when people are actively trying to remove synthetic fragrance from their homes. Candle warnings, essential oil skepticism, and a general fatigue with “clean scent” marketing have pushed a lot of households toward wanting less artificial stuff in the air they breathe, not more gadgets promising to fix it chemically. Potpourri never asks you to add a fragrance oil at all. The scent is simply whatever the flower produces, on its own schedule, in its own intensity.

I do wonder about the practical realities of living with this thing daily. Flowers die. Petals brown and drop. Someone has to actually tend a living organism instead of just refilling a water tank and forgetting about it for a month. That is a real commitment compared to a standard humidifier, and I suspect it will appeal most to people who already enjoy having plants around and don’t mind the occasional pruning. It is not a low-maintenance gadget pretending to be one, and I respect that Zhang did not try to disguise that tradeoff.

What Potpourri ultimately represents is a small but honest rethink of a category that has gotten stuck in sameness. Home appliances rarely ask us to nurture something in exchange for the function they provide. This one does, and the exchange feels fair. You give it light and water, it gives you humidity and a scent nobody bottled in a factory. In a category full of devices trying to imitate nature, it is refreshing to find one that just invited nature in directly.

The post The Humidifier That Refuses To Use Synthetic Scent first appeared on Yanko Design.